


Going to Wichita

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-10
Updated: 2011-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-22 11:51:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I keep forgetting the reasons it's a bad idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going to Wichita

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted March 2004.

Going To Wichita  
By Candle Beck

Something happened during the off-season.

First thing you gotta know is that it wasn’t a big deal. It was brief, it was spur-of-the-moment. We were just killing time. We didn’t mean anything by it.

Mulder, he’d come over to my place to borrow a couple of CDs early in December, the dull midst of winter when the shine of our memories of last season was rubbing off and we were still months away from spring training, the toughest part of the year, the farthest away we ever got from baseball.

I offered him a beer when he came in, and it was pretty much downhill from then, watching part of a football game and getting fair and well hammered, me twice as drunk on half as much beer, because I’ve always been kind of a lightweight (don’t tell anybody, okay?), but Mulder doubled my pace to keep up, and I could tell he was rolling hard by the blurry scan of his eyes, his slow blinks, his face flushed, his hand careful setting his bottle down on the coffee table.

It was a pretty normal night, nothing to worry about.

Coming on one in the morning, and Mulder said, “Dude, listen . . . dude,” looking at me expectantly like I should be able to parse out his meaning from that. Always been kind of an inarticulate drunk, my friend Mulder. Maybe I can’t drink much, but at least I can hold what liquor does go down.

“Yeah, bud,” I answered, raising my eyebrows to let him know he hadn’t actually finished his thought.

Mulder looked at me in confusion for a second, then half-smiled, saying, “Right. You wanna . . . you should, um . . . maybe you’ve got some aspirin you wanna give me? You know, ‘cause tomorrow probably my head’ll hurt, you think? So, like . . . um, preventative. Yeah?”

I rolled my eyes, grinning. “Sure. Be right back.”

I went into my bedroom, into the bathroom, digging around in the cabinet, finding three empty bottles of aspirin before I found one that rattled (it’s a pack rat thing. Because you never know when an empty bottle of aspirin might come in handy). I shook out four powder-white pills (Mulder claimed that recommended dosages don’t apply to a guy his size, he was always taking a couple more than everyone else), and when I headed back out, I found Mulder lying on my bed.

“Hey,” I said. He tipped his head back so he could look at me, grinning upside down. “Got your aspirin. And just make yourself at home, by the way.”

Mulder took me at my word, stretching out his arms over his head, his shirt getting pulled up so that I could see a ribbon of skin low on his stomach, a little pale without his steady summer’s tan, looking good against the faded blue of his jeans, the dim brass gleam of the button, a skinny little highway that I could imagine, with utter clarity, swiping my tongue down the length of.

All right, hang on, back up. Let me set you straight (so to speak). You should know, at this point in the story, that I’ve developed a sort of . . . thing for Mulder. Not a crush, because we’re not in junior high school, but nothing much more serious than that. Because, contrary to popular belief, I’m actually not stupid enough to let myself fall in love with Mark Mulder. Pure masochism, that’d be.

But yeah, I want to sleep with him, okay. Fair enough. No big deal. A lot of people want to sleep with him. If he’s not totally endearing (which he isn’t, a lot of the time), he makes up for it by being just about as hot as the sun, and of course he knows that, you think all that arrogance of his is just ‘cause he’s such a good pitcher? Nah, man, it’s also got to do with the fact that nobody’s ever really said no to him.

He’s tough, is the thing. And also he’s so fucking sure of himself, it’s like when he looks at you, no matter who you are, he’s telling you with his eyes, ‘Of course you’re gonna want me, are ya blind, how could you not want me?’

Fucking egotistical son of a bitch.

He’s kinda got a point, though.

So, all right, I wouldn’t exactly mind pulling his shirt off him, I wouldn’t exactly mind popping the button on his jeans, I wouldn’t exactly mind figuring out if he’ll live up to the expectations I have of him and he has of himself. But I’m not really banking on it, because, for all his effortless and universal appeal, girls are the only ones who seem to draw him as he draws them, at least as far as I can see.

A fucking crying shame.

Okay, so, whatever. No huge tragedy. It’s not like I was about to make a pass at him or something. I would have been fine just watching him from afar, maybe occasionally letting myself think about it, imagine it, but it wasn’t anything that was gonna drive me crazy, it was just kind of easy and comfortable, a nice bonus to my life that not only did I have the best job in the world in the best city in the world, but I also had some high-quality eye candy to keep me occupied when my mind was wandering.

Corner of my mind, is all it was. I swear. Sometimes very vague, like I’d almost forget about it, and then suddenly he’d catch me off guard, slipping in through the back door, shell-shocking me with some perfect grin, and I’d be thinking, ‘Jesus fucking Christ, he’s got to be illegal, nobody can look that good and not be breaking the law.’

But that didn’t happen too often.

And I wasn’t too concerned about the implications of all this. You get a lot of practice being discreet in my line of work, if you’re the kinda guy who every now and then wants to see another guy naked. I’ve been keeping this side of my life on the down-low since high school, no reason why this should be any more of a problem than it has been in the past.

So, okay, we’re caught up, right? Me wanting to sleep with Mulder, Mulder lying all casual and stretched out on my bed like he’d been sneaking peeks at my imagination.

Mulder groaned with extravagant satisfaction (which was, like, totally unfair), pulling out the tension of the day, then said conversationally, “You got a pretty nice bed.”

I sat down on the bed beside him, dropping the aspirins on his stomach, replying, “Yeah, I know. Top of the line, this bed.”

Mulder picked up the pills, leaving chalky white marks on his shirt, and sat up, reaching over for the glass of water of the bedside table, swallowing all four in one quick gulp, saying as he lay back down, “Nothing but the best.”

“Sure enough.”

We were quiet for a second, our knees bumping, me half turned around so I could keep an eye on him, but he was just lying there boneless, his eyes closed (treacherous, treacherous), a lazy Sunday afternoon look on his face, though it was past midnight and I was pretty sure it was a Tuesday (hard to keep track of the days of the week during the off-season).

Eventually he opened his eyes and said, his voice a little rough, “Fucking hate the off-season.”

I nodded. We’ve had this discussion before. “Me too,” I replied, though I don’t think I take it as hard as he does, I don’t think the winter’s so tough for me, ‘cause I can kick around and amuse myself all right, but with Mulder, man, if it’s not baseball it’s not worth doing.

Mulder pulled himself up on his elbows, looking hazy and drunk. “Just so fucking bored all the time,” he said, his eyes blurry the way they got when he was tired. His shirt was still rucked up, getting worse all the time, and I could see the old appendectomy scar on his stomach, the scattering of goosebumps where the chill breeze from the window brushed across his skin, could imagine, with perfect vividness, what it would be like to try and lick them away.

I shrugged, trying to keep my eyes above his collar. “Well, two more months, dude, you can make it.”

He let himself fall back, shaking the bed. “Two and a half,” he answered, sounding like he didn’t really think he was going to make it.

I sighed, sensing that he wasn’t going to listen to me tonight. “All right, want another one?” I asked, standing.

Mulder nodded, saying up to the ceiling, “Yeah. Then come back and entertain me.”

I turned away, snickering to myself, thinking, ‘Dude, I’ll entertain you, just give me a chance, I’ll keep you busy as long as you want me to.’

But whatever.

I got two beers from the kitchen, came back into the bedroom to see that Mulder had either passed out or fallen asleep, but either way, was lying there unconscious on my bed.

All right, seriously, this was getting out of hand, this was like temptation laid out to me on a platter, laid out to me on my freaking bed, this just wasn’t cool.

I put the beers down on the floor and poked at Mulder’s shoulder. “Dude,” I said low, getting no response. I poked harder. “Wake up, bro,” I said a bit louder, trying to keep my voice casual so that he wouldn’t wake up all freaked out.

Still no response. Sleeps like the fucking dead, this one. I gave up on subtlety, shaking his arm, one knee up on the bed to keep my balance, bending over him. “Mulder, up and at ‘em, rise and shine. Come on, man, it’s time to go to the ballpark,” figuring that more than anything else would get him moving.

Mulder rolled away from my hand, muttering half-incoherently, “Fuckin’ . . . nah, go’way, go’way.”

I rolled my eyes, climbing all the way up onto the bed. I reached out, touching his face, his cheek, his nose, my fingers flickering over his eyebrows, shadowed on his mouth. I touched his throat carefully, hooked a finger in his shirt collar and tugged it out, a little glimpse of the fine smooth lines of his collarbones, the hollow at the base of his throat. Figured this was okay, because if he woke up, I could have my hand off him before his eyes cleared, and it wasn’t like I was fucking with him, I wasn’t gonna do anything, like, untoward with his passed-out body (not that I didn’t have some ideas), I wasn’t doing anything, just trying to wake him up, normal buddy stuff.

I shook him again, still trying to spur him out of it, saying all kinds of shit. “Mulder, ya fuckin’ hack, you call that a fastball, you’re going back down to Sacramento if you keep this up, fuckin’ bush league,” and then I flicked his ear, his face flinching just before his eyes blinked halfway open, looking confused.

“You say something?” he asked, or more accurately, “Youse a summin?” but I translated it all right.

“Come on, bud, time to get up,” I said, sliding my hands under his arm and trying to push him up. He just made a discontented noise, his eyes closed again, shifting away from me, his face vaguely disturbed.

“Lemme ‘lone, Zito, go to sleep, lousy punk,” he mumbled, on his side facing away from me, his head on his arm, sinking down into sleep again so quickly I was watching him go, his face smoothing out, his body loosening, and I sat back, thinking that Mulder was probably out for the night, deciding to wash my hands of him.

I left him there sleeping and got ready for bed myself, a little unsteady on my feet as I brushed my teeth.

When I snapped off the light in the bedroom, Mulder became just this big lump at the other end of the bed, sighing impatiently in his sleep.

I briefly considered sleeping on the couch, but goddamn it, that was my bed he’d crashed out in, he should be the one on the couch, and anyway, the bed was plenty big enough for both of us (nothing but the best, after all), and anyway, he was already passed out, he’d never know the difference, and anyway, it wasn’t like I had an awful lot of opportunities to be in the same bed as Mulder, and didn’t that sound like something I should take advantage of?

Why, yes. Yes, it did.

I slipped in, careful not to pull the sheets too hard, and settled in quietly, keeping my breathing even. Unobtrusive, don’t you know. I could feel him, couple a feet between us, the slow rhythm of his breath, the slight awareness of heat, the mattress sloping down a bit under his weight, and I shifted so I was looking at his back, wanting to rest my forehead on the smooth nape of his neck, wanting to curve my arm around him, pull him back against me, see how we fit together, wanting to press my mouth to the crook of his shoulder, learn what the beat of his pulse feels like under my tongue, slide my hand across his stomach, up under the shirt, hear him gasp as he wakes up already half-hard, not knowing whose hand it is unbuttoning his jeans, not knowing but not wanting it to stop either, and if I roll him over quick enough, if I can get my mouth on his before he gets his eyes fully open, then we’ll probably be past the point of no return, it probably won’t take much more for his drunken sensibilities to decide that getting some action tonight would be pretty cool, no matter who it’s coming from, probably it won’t take much . . .

Well.

Obviously I’m not gonna molest the man in his sleep in the hopes of catching him in that perfect intoxicated interval when sexual orientation stops mattering. I still got some morals. Not a lot, but some.

I kept to my side of the bed, closing my eyes, trying to figure out if that new smell in the air was him, maybe, sweat-clean and sharp.

I drifted off, weirdly at ease, probably just drunk enough myself to not be disconcerted by the presence of someone else in my bed, and I was dreaming of Rome and the All-Star game when Mulder rolled over suddenly, cracking his skull against my own.

“Motherfuck!” I half-shouted, burst out of sleep, sitting bolt upright with one hand against the rising knot on my head. I dislodged Mulder, who’d been trying to use my shoulder as a pillow, but neither my abrupt cry of pain nor his own thwacked head did anything to stir him, and I glared down at him, sleeping there all peaceful with a darkening red mark on his forehead.

“Didn’t think you could be more of a pain in the ass asleep than you are awake, but hey, you’ve proved me wrong,” I told his unconscious form, not bothering to keep my voice down, rubbing the dully aching bump.

I laid back down, making sure to keep out of Mulder’s range of motion, not trusting him to keep from clocking me with an unconscious left hook, and tried to fall back asleep, but it was hard going, and I shifted to catch a glimpse of the clock, the glowing red numbers informing me that it was just past four in the morning, and I sighed, at least happy that dawn was still a couple of hours away, I still had awhile of it being dark enough to hide in.

Not that I got anything to hide from, understand, but you know how sometimes you just want to be kept secret, just want to be stashed away and left alone.

About then was when Mulder started talking in his sleep. He’s been keeping me awake with that shit for three years now, all the hotel rooms we’ve shared on the road, him chattering away until I get pissed off and throw a pillow at him, always feigning sleep when he wakes up swearing, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened.

Anyway, this wasn’t so bad, ‘cause I’ve never been able to really hear what he’s saying on the road, and now I figure I got a better opportunity, being in the same bed as him and all, now I can maybe catch a listen and hear something good.

But it was pretty much no use, Mulder not being any more coherent in his sleep than he was awake, mumbling against the pillow, “Yeah, that’s . . . the train, going . . . no, fuck, you ain’t . . . okay fucker okay,” then a bunch of indecipherable stuff, then a world-weary sigh like existence was just way too much effort, then a snuffling cough, and then he said, completely clear, “I don’t think so,” and his eyes came open.

I just blinked at him for a second, not sure if he was really awake, seeing the slow cloudy drift of sleep sink away from his eyes, his forehead lining as he adjusted to the dark and the fact that I was in bed with him.

I was kinda half-waiting for him to spring up all offended and awkward, I was half-expecting the cold blast of air when he would sling the sheets away, stalking off, maybe challenging me to a duel for insulting his honor or something, but he just looked at me confused and asked, his voice surprisingly mild, “How come you’re in my bed, dude?”

Like this wasn’t anything so unexpected, like he’d seen this coming.

I breathed out a laugh. “Could ask you the same question,” I told him, his face drawing a little as he worked out the meaning of that, lifting his head to look around the room, realizing where he was.

“Oh,” he said, settling back down. “Guess I passed out a little bit, huh?”

“Little bit, yeah,” I responded, resting my cheek on my hand, both of us lying on our sides facing each other.

He was quiet for a moment, his features flickering in the shadows, the pull of his mouth, the glacial twist in his eyes, then he asked, “Why does my head hurt?”

I ducked my eyes down, covering my smirk with the heel of my hand, answered guilelessly, “I dunno, man, it’s a mystery.” Deciding to make the most of his uncertainty, I said with as much innocence as I could muster, “But you got a mark on your forehead, maybe that’s why.”

He lifted his hand, poking at the bruise, wincing, his eyes snapping as he struggled through his memory. “Well, how the fuck did that happen?”

I shrugged, about two seconds from busting a gut laughing, trying to keep my face still. He was looking at me distrustfully, he was looking warm and strong and softened by the night, and I whispered again, “It’s a mystery,” then I reached out, not really aware of what I was doing, and brushed my fingers across his forehead, clear away the bruise, thinking abstractly of the mark of Cain, thinking of being branded.

My hand cool on his forehead, and Mulder’s eyes drifting shut, breathing out long and low, and then I was watching my hand smooth down the side of his face, his cheekbone tucked into the cup of my palm, my thumb tracing the line of his nose, gracing over his mouth, unable to keep from noticing the way his lips parted just ever-so-slightly at my touch, and I was swallowing compulsively, my mouth dry, my eyes huge, my mind ratcheting through probably a billion different thoughts, all fractured and inchoate, blending together, and throughout it all the quick excited scatter of one single awareness, one giddy driving chant that kept my hand moving past the fear and uncertainty: he’s not pulling away, he’s not pulling away, he’s not pulling away.

Which was, you know, all the encouragement I needed.

(Never said I wasn’t easy.)

I wasn’t really sure what was happening, at that moment. I mean, it was four in the morning, we’d just woken up in the same bed, it was all quiet and dark around us, like we were undercover, like we were the one thing in the world God didn’t have his eye on, just this side of reality, just knocked off-kilter a little bit, so maybe this didn’t count, sneaking in under the radar like this, maybe we were getting away with something.

I don’t know. It was a kind of strange instant in my life, no doubt.

I slipped my hand over Mulder’s chin, followed the dents of his throat downward, felt the bob of his Adam’s apple under my fingertips, keeping my eyes locked on his face, looking for realization and outrage, looking for anger and the end of our friendship, but he just looked dream-vague, his roughened breathing my only clue that he was even still awake.

I touched the notch where his throat met his chest, noticing that my thumb fit perfectly in there, then, holding my breath, I flattened my palm on the warm flat plane of his chest, aware of the roar of blood in my ears, terribly aware of his skin under the cobweb-thin T-shirt, and gave him a little push, and he obediently rolled onto his back, the first and only instruction that Mark Mulder has ever taken from me.

I caught my breath, wanting to take a moment and confirm this, fuse it into my memory, Mulder lying there with his untouchable face, the shadows gathering on his shut eyelids, his tongue zipping out to dart across his lips, I wanted to take a moment and make sure that this was real as it felt, but I didn’t want to mess up my rhythm, afraid I’d scare Mulder off if I gave him even a second to consider this.

Sliding my hand down his chest, I moved closer, until my shoulder was against his, and I was all wrapped up in the film of heat pulsing out of him. I tugged up his shirt and man, that first time when I finally hit skin-on-skin, that first moment when my palm was icing across his stomach, hard muscle and smooth and clean, and I couldn’t help it, couldn’t do a thing about it, I dropped my head and pressed my mouth to his shoulder, tasting his shirt, the bite of laundry detergent and the raspy cotton fiber, and I was moving my hand carefully over his body, and he was gasping then, shaking a little bit, and then I guess there was a skinny shaft of light breaking through in his brain, I guess somewhere something clicked on, propriety, orientation, some last-ditch stab at rationality, because there was his voice, low and dark and uncertain, broke up with quick pulls of air, “What . . . ah . . . what’re you d-doing, man?”

I snuck a quick look up at him, panicked for a second, thinking he was telling me to stop, but his eyes still weren’t open, his hands still at his sides, balled up into fists but not looking like he was about to haul off and knock me one, and I shook my head, my hair brushing his cheek, my hand undoing the first button of his jeans as I whispered in reply, “I . . . I don’t really know. You’re okay, though, yeah?”

Maybe not exactly a fair question to ask him, considering I was popping open the rest of the buttons one at a time, the finger-snap sounds quiet and subversive in the stillness of the room. Considering where my hand was, probably it wasn’t the nicest thing to ask him for a well-reasoned response to the situation.

But it wasn’t like I was gonna stop touching him. That wasn’t really an option, at this point.

As it was, though, Mulder just pulled in a ragged breath and said unevenly, “Yeah, I’m . . . I’m okay. I’m cool.”

Seriously, just about the best thing I’ve ever heard.

I grinned and ducked my head, dragging my tongue hard up his throat, feeling the vibration of his groan as my skin flushed and sparked with desire, the fabric of his shorts crisp and white under my fingers, and I mumbled into his neck, “You’re cool, you’re cool. You’re fucking hot,” and then his hand was in my hair and he was hauling me up face-to-face, and I had a split second to realize that his eyes were open now, wide open, no way he could be pretending I was anyone else, before he crushed his mouth to mine and, well, you know. World ended. Sun exploded. Sky crashed down around us. Things of this nature.

It was pretty awesome, there’s no doubt about it.

* * *

All right, so. This happened. Okay.

His fault for falling asleep in my bed. My fault for not taking the couch. His fault for cracking his skull into mine and waking me up. My fault for not explaining to him why he woke up with his head hurting. His fault for looking at me the way he did, all flawless and half-asleep. My fault for touching him. His fault for not pulling away. My fault for not stopping while we were still on the right side of friendship. His fault for saying he was okay with it. My fault for having my hand where it was. His fault for kissing me a second or two before I woulda kissed him. My fault for crying his name out brokenly, my fault for the shiver of his body under my hands, my fault for his taste in my mouth, my fault for not wanting it to end, my fault for the bite mark on his throat, the one on his chest, the one on his hip, my fault for his hands in my hair, my fault for the way I could swear I saw him smiling in the middle of it, my fault for thinking that smile was worth just about anything.

Definitely my fault. Credit where credit is due, don’t you know.

Next morning Mulder was gone. But who didn’t see that coming?

(besides me, I mean.)

* * *

I woke up with my head all buzzy and happy, my body loose and unconcerned, that I-got-laid-last-night strum running all throughout me, and I yawned, stretching my arms extravagantly, my back cracking.

I sat up and it was quiet, or city-quiet at least, the hushed rumble of traffic outside a constant soundtrack, the light streaming in the window bright yellow and coating everything over gold, me included.

There was a crash of sheets on the other side of the bed, the pillow smashed out of form, and I listened for Mulder in the bathroom maybe, in the kitchen, kicking it on the couch with a bowl of cereal watching cartoons, but I couldn’t hear nothing, so I pulled on my boxers and found a shirt under the bed, going out to investigate.

Pretty well empty, my apartment. Ghosts everywhere, like always, memories, but no one so concrete, no one solid and warm and grinning at me, no one tossing me an orange, no one with his bare feet up on the coffee table, spilling milk on my couch.

Pretty well empty.

I checked the kitchen table for a note, checked the refrigerator magnets, but it was just pizza delivery numbers and the snapshots of my friends and family, smiling and frozen laughing, squinting against the sun, Mulder there in the midst of all the faces, one arm slung around Chavez’s shoulders, the other around Hudson’s, mugging for the camera, and I was there in the background, looking surprised for some reason.

I turned on the coffee maker and poured some orange juice, sitting down at the kitchen table, flipping disinterestedly through an six-month old issue of Sporting News, and then I sat back and didn’t think about anything for awhile, and then I said into the silence of my apartment, “Fuck you, Mulder,” and then I got up and fixed myself a cup of coffee.

* * *

We didn’t talk to each other for three weeks after that. Frankly, I was a little surprised we ever talked to each other again, but I guess there’s some stuff you can’t really avoid, no matter how hard you try.

I did my own thing, you know, wandering around, haunting the used bookstores in Berkeley and the music store south of Mission that had the guitar chords of, like, every song ever. I kept trying to get interested in football, but that was pretty much a lost cause. Say what you want about the relative slowness of baseball, at least it doesn’t take us twenty minutes of time outs and commercials to get through two minutes on the clock.

But then, we don’t even got a clock, so.

I didn’t think about it too much. Well. That’s kind of a lie. But I didn’t think about it overly much, I wouldn’t say. Just a sort of natural, garden-variety level of thinking about it. Nothing to worry about.

Found myself wondering what he was up to, sometimes. Found myself wanting to call him up, see if he wanted to hang out, check up on how the off-season was treating him. I didn’t, though, because not really a glutton for punishment, me.

And then it was Christmas, and I went home to see the family, the winter always seeming like a joke down in southern California, where it was seventy degrees on Christmas Day and Bing Crosby sounded just weird singing about a white Christmas as the sun caught up in the fans of the palm trees, fracturing shadows down on the sand.

It was pretty okay, getting away for a bit, letting my mom make a fuss over me and hanging out with my sisters (I thought growing up with all girls was hard, but dude, spending basically all my time with guys for the majority of the year put me straight on that one), knocking around my old hometown.

Whenever I spend too much time down south, I always end up thinking that there’s something important missing from this place, all the bleached flat lights, burned out neon, the scour of the streetlights and the wail of taxi cabs and ambulances, there was this hard lack of depth, like the never-ending press of the sun and constant wreck of the ocean against the shore had beaten something out of the desert cities, left them overly-bright and dry and godless.

But this time it was fully welcome, because there’s something else about it down here. It’s got no memory, I guess. Each day you wake up in the same easily-understood world, the same fierce sun through the window, and nothing ever changes, everything gets lost in the unmarked passage of time. Down in Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Diego, the Valley, the beaches at Malibu, it’s easy enough to forget the things you’re trying to escape, which is probably why so many people end up down here, because down here you wake up every morning brand new and without any of your old sins.

I got back late, hauling an extra suitcase full of presents (the ‘rents definitely spoil me rotten, but I’m not complaining), coming in over the bay into SFO, that long sail over the water, when the plane keeps getting lower and I keep thinking that this time they’re not gonna make it, this time they’re gonna fall short, skittering across the waves, trailing seaweed from the wheels, but then right before we crash, the runway comes out of nowhere and we thump down, the pilot telling us, “And if San Francisco is your final destination, welcome home,” me wondering when it was this became home for me, wondering how much longer I would last in the Bay Area.

I checked my messages, a couple of season’s greetings from friends, a couple of telemarketers, Chavez calling to invite me to a New Year’s Eve party at his house. Their house.

My first instinct was to call him and beg off, not wanting the trouble of it, not wanting to deal with Mulder just yet, though I don’t really know why I expected that someday I would actually *want* to deal with Mulder, but it was too late to call, so I slept on it and woke up feeling contrary and self-destructive, called Chavez and told him to count me in.

Because . . . yeah.

* * *

Over at Mulder and Chavez’s house on New Year’s Eve, the place was packed, teammates and friends and families, everybody we knew and all their brothers, people sardined into every room, crowding the hallways, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, nine people sprawled across the couch in the living room (which broke our previous record), knocking elbows into ears, piles of socked feet on the coffee table, crossed over each other, links of ankles and calves, shoulders overlapping, girls in the laps of guys and other girls, arms hooked around necks, noses pressed against backs.

The whole place was rumbling, hundreds of different conversations and three different stereos going all at once, arguing with each other, people laughing and clinking bottles, the television drafting out catastrophic images of Times Square, a messy bobbing crush of people cheering under the fire-lit sky in New York City.

I worked my way through, exchanging greetings and high fives, rolling my eyes, taking knocks of peoples’ drinks, hanging out long enough to hear a dirty joke then moving on, until I got to the living room and spotted Chavez out by the pool through the open back door, cupping my hands around my mouth, hollering over the noise, “Chavvy!”

He turned from his conversation with a fella I didn’t know, and I waved to get his attention, a bright grin breaking on his face, and he yelled something back that I couldn’t hear. I shook my head, pointing to my ear, and he motioned c’mere with his hand.

I carefully moved across the room, stepping over outstretched legs, arms out for balance. There was someone lying full out on his back, an A’s cap pulled down over his face, and I bent down, tipped up the brim to find Jermaine Dye grinning at me.

“How’s it going, dude?” I asked him, cocking my head to the side. “Little early to be punking out, Jermaine, ya big girl.”

He swiped a hand at me, me ducking out of the way, laughing, then pulled himself up on his elbows and shouted to the room in general, “Hey, everybody, Zito’s here now, let’s get him wasted!”

This proposal was met with enthusiastic cheers from the crowd, and somebody called from the kitchen doorway, “Catch, lefty!” tossing a can of beer in my direction. I popped it open, sucking off the foam, and took a pull, tugging Jermaine’s cap back down before I rose and continued out to the patio.

As I stepped out onto the concrete, the swift pull of the wind blowing my shirt tight, I thought I heard something, my name maybe, something, a low voice, deep and like it was right in my ear, and I jerked around, my head snapping, my eyes scanning across the slam of people, looking, searching out, but there was just all those flushed faces, all that giddy holiday laughter, and I shrugged it off, moved over to where Chavez was.

Chavez let me know he was drunk right off the bat, slinging his arm around me, giving me a quick one-armed hug, his face against my shoulder, brashly clapping his hand on my back, saying happily, “Dude, welcome! Now the party can start.”

I laughed as he moved back, wobbling a bit. “You’re having a good night, it would seem.”

He grinned, taking a pull off his beer. “Four hours to midnight, you bet I’m having a good night.” He turned to the guy standing with him, an unfamiliar guy with a goofy grin on his face. “This is my buddy Robbie, down from Seattle. This is Zito, he’s a total spaz but we let him hang around anyway.”

I rolled my eyes, shaking Robbie’s hand, Robbie nodding, saying, “Yeah, I know, hey, man, you’re awesome.”

I blushed, shrugging. “Um, thanks,” I said uncomfortably (I’ve never been able to take a compliment. My sister Sally says it’s false modesty, but I don’t know, I just always seem to end up blushing and stammering and then talking too loud to get past it.).

Chavez elbowed me. “How’s the fam?”

“Good,” I answered. “They all say hi.”

“Cool, cool. Right back at them,” Chavez said, going to take another drink of his beer and finding it empty, looking at it in confusion for a second, like he didn’t quite understand where all the alcohol had gone. “A’ight, I gotta go get another. Robs, you wanna meet that girl I was telling you about?”

Robbie nodded, smoothing down his hair and straightening his collar, and the two of them headed inside.

I looked up at the sky. There were other people out on the patio, only a matter of time before someone got shoved unsuspecting into the pool, but I was taking a moment to be antisocial, just stand here and drink my beer and try to figure out which direction the pier was from here, where the fireworks would batter the sky, flaring all the night with those carnival colors.

 

After awhile, I turned, maybe going back inside, maybe finding someone to talk to out here, and I saw Mulder, leaning against the house, watching me.

It was . . . he looked just the same. I don’t know what I was expecting, but he looked just the same. Nothing written on his face, nothing branded. The bruise on his forehead was gone, faded away during the three weeks I hadn’t seen him. All the other marks were probably gone by now too.

You think, after something like this has happened, you should be able to see it, it should leave its patterns on your face, threads of it in your eyes. It should follow you around, like your shadow stitched to your feet, because your life is already lousy with ghosts, and this ought to haunt you worse than any of them.

Maybe I looked like that, but he didn’t. He just looked indecipherable, masked, maybe because he was standing in darkness, maybe that’s why I couldn’t read him, but then, when have I ever been able to read him?

I was trying to think of something to say, anything, rocketing through my mind, but everything sounded stupid or silly or bitter, and I didn’t even know how I wanted to handle this, if I was gonna forgive him, pretend it never happened, ignore him, tell him to fuck off, if I was gonna nearly beg him, “Come on, one more chance, one more time, what do you think, let’s try it again, it’ll be worth it, don’t you know that, it’ll be so good, dude, come on, what do you say?”

Nah. He’s not the only one who’s got pride.

I tipped my head at him, just the barest acknowledgement, saw something bright whip through his eyes, saw the line of his jaw harden, saw him turn and duck into the house without a single word.

Well, all right. If that’s the way he wants it, fine. Not like I fucking care.

I drifted through the night, midnight running closer and closer, the hours melting away like an ice cube in my hand. I moved from circle to circle, full-on party mode, seeing myself out-of-body sometimes, thinking, ‘hey, what a fucking charmer,’ and then a second or two later, ‘jesus, trying too hard,’ playing cards on the kitchen counter, throwing back shots like it’s my job, laughing and keeping my eye on the couch and chairs clustered in the living room, on the look-out for an opening, but every time there was somewhere to sit down, by the time I was two steps towards it, somebody else had beat me to it.

Didn’t see much of Mulder. Wasn’t sure if it was him keeping away from me or me keeping away from him, maybe just coincidence, the way you can be at a party for hours and then see somebody for the first time who’s been there all night, unknowingly moving past each other. Occasionally we’d be in the same room together, but always on different sides, always too loud for me to hear what he was saying, except occasionally when I’d hear him laughing, the good sound of it rising above the ruckus, look over to see his head thrown back.

And once, just once, I was coming out of the bathroom and saw him at the other end of the hallway, by his bedroom door, flipping through a stack of CDs, looking for quality party music, I saw him standing there with his eyes down, picked out geometrically by the angled yellow light, the first couple of buttons on his shirt thumbed open, a brief glimpse of the sweet vee of skin high on his chest, saw him standing there and I wanted to go over and take a handful of his shirt and drag him into his bedroom, wanted to flatten him against the wall and be on my knees before he had a chance to say my name, wanted to feel his hands go from strong and pushing me away to hanging on, combing through, wanted to look up and see his head tipped back against the wall, his mouth open, his eyes closed, the CDs clattering to the floor.

But I just went back into the other room.

I was straight blitzed by a half-hour to midnight, and still crushing beers, the place getting incrementally louder as the minutes ticked down, people coming and going, there then gone again and hard for me to keep track, hard for me to keep my eyes open, the colors blurring, smearing like wet paint, and I would find myself on the back patio without remembering how I got there, find myself in a group of all girls, chattering away about their brothers and my sisters, find myself with Chavvy piggybacking a ride, his arms almost choking around my throat until I dumped him into the pool, find myself sitting on the floor of the living room, too close to the television, bad for the eyes, déjà vu watching Dick Clark, waiting for the ball to drop.

Ten minutes to the new year, and I stumbled to my feet, distractedly intending to get a fresh one, but as I rose, my head did a kind of swan dive, spinning, and I got one hand up on the wall, trying to steady myself, the noise of the room spiraling around me, making me dizzy.

There was a hand on my shoulder, and I looked over blearily to see Hudson standing there, his mouth moving but no sound coming out, a vaguely concerned expression on his face.

I shook my head, said, “What?” the word echoing around in my mind.

Now I could hear him, a little bit anyway, broken up, “. . . look like hell. You . . . some fresh air?”

That sounded like a plan, and I nodded loosely. “Yeah, good idea, good idea.”

Huddy got me into the front hall, but I waved him off from there, saying, “Go on, be all right, be right back in.” He clapped me on the arm and turned back to the party, me thinking foggily that my friends rocked.

I missed the doorknob my first couple of tries, but eventually got my hand around it, tripping out onto the front path, the night immediately going blessedly quiet, just the second-degree party noise sneaking out through the windows and around the corner of the house, my head clearing, breathing deep.

There was no one out on the chipped stone path, though there were crushed plastic cups and empties strewn on the grass of the short lawn, everyone having congregated inside for the coming moment.

Cool and fresh out there on the front path, the twining shadows under the trees, the way far off gleam of other houses through the branches, spots of orange hanging in the air like the ends of cigarettes, and I searched idly for Orion like I always did, thinking that soon this year would be over, soon we’d be back to square one again, trying to figure out what I had left behind over the past twelve months, what I’d gained, trying to see if my life was balanced out yet.

The door opened behind me, and I turned, thinking that it was probably Huddy come to check on me, or someone come to drag me in for the countdown, but it was only a few minutes shy of midnight and that meant that of course it could be no one other than Mulder.

He stepped out, letting the door close behind him, and stuck his hands in his pockets, watching me with something that would have been nervousness, had this been anyone else.

There was a long pause, listening to the creak of the trees, the excited rustle from the house, then Mulder said, his voice a bit hoarse from the night of drinking and talking louder than usual, “You all right?”

Okay. That’s something. I can work with that.

I nodded carefully, trying to stand easy, casual. “Yeah, just some . . . fresh air.”

He nodded, looking away, and I was looking at his profile, the ruff of hair sticking up off the back of his head, thinking about licking my palm and smoothing it down.

A lot of stuff to be said, obviously. But we’ve never been much for talking, him and me. Not about the important stuff, anyway. I wished it was the summer, because then we’d have the game to hold us together, baseball, the perfect excuse, not like now, when we weren’t really friends anymore, couldn’t really be considered friends, because friends don’t fuck with each other like we do, like we did, friends don’t end up in each other’s beds with nothing but violence and desire to keep them company, and without the game, without our friendship, the only thing that was connecting us was that night three weeks before, that was the only thing between us now, and I swear, I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known it’d mean losing him, I wouldn’t have, I swear to God.

He turned his eyes back to me, stepping off the porch onto the path, into the washed light. “Listen, man,” he said, and I thought maybe we’d talk about it after all, but then I saw the hard resolution in his face and knew that he’d already decided the way this was gonna go, I wasn’t gonna have a say in anything.

“What . . . what happened, that was . . . fucked up,” he stated, and I felt a sharp burst of anger drum through me, so fucking easy for him, to brush it aside, to call it fucked up and then call it done, so fucking like him to make it sound that simple, just a mistake, just one more thing to be forgotten.

“I didn’t exactly hear you protesting,” I said, the words tight, cold on my tongue.

His eyes narrowed, glaring at me. “Not like you really gave me a fucking chance to,” he spat out, and my mouth was already open, my eyes widening, about to remind him that I had asked, I did, I asked if he was okay and he said he was, he said he was cool, what the fuck was he talking about, claiming I hadn’t given him a chance, but then his face flashed regret and he held up a hand to cut me off, shaking his head, saying low, “I mean . . . I was . . . I was drunk.”

I was working my way up to being pissed off beyond belief at him, a familiar position to find myself in, unable to believe he was gonna use that as an excuse, unable to believe that he expected me to consider that a legitimate reason, because fuck being drunk, Mulder had never in his life done a single thing that he didn’t want to do, and fuck him for claiming that I was the first one to break him of that habit.

“You know what, Mulder, you can go fuck yourself, okay?” I told him, my voice roughening harsh, his expression going surprised for a second at the barely restrained hostility in my words. “You can try all you want to convince yourself that what happened was a mistake, that you were drunk and didn’t want it, that I took fucking advantage of you, but we both know that’s bullshit.”

He took a step towards me, his hands out of his pockets and in fists, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t gonna hit me (not totally sure, but almost), so I stepped forward too, letting him know he didn’t scare me.

“What the fuck do you want from me, Zito?” he asked, his eyes silvery and hard, his voice cracking. “Fine, you weren’t fucking with me, I was there too, fine, maybe I didn’t tell you to stop but I sure as shit should have, and it’s not gonna happen again, so why do you want to make it more complicated than it is, why won’t you just let it fucking be?”

“You’re the one who came out here,” I pointed out to him, adrenaline slick on the surface of my skin, humming along. “You’re the one who started talking. I’ve been pretending it didn’t happen all fucking night, because I thought that’s what you wanted, and fuck me if I didn’t think I owed it to you to make it easier to deal with. Now you come out here, you say all this shit, so for Christ’s sake, man, what the fuck do you want from *me*?”

His eyes went crazy, anarchic and wild, taking my breath away, and he said, his voice raw, “I want you to leave me alone.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “What the fuck are you talking about? I haven’t come anywhere near you, I haven’t done anything, I *have* left you alone.”

And he shook his head, his eyes terrified, terrifying, edge-of-the-cliff reckless, and then he was reaching out, his hand fisting tight in my shirt, and he whispered brutally, helplessly, “No, you haven’t,” and then he was pulling me to him, our mouths meeting too hard, a quick red blossom of pain as our teeth hit, but then he was kissing me, absolutely annihilating me, his tongue in my mouth and his hand twisting, ripping the shirt, green threads around his fingers, and there were explosions, disastrous colors tearing at the sky, lights going off behind my eyes, my arm around his waist holding him tight against me, a wreck of heat, blistering.

We tore away from each other when the need for oxygen reasserted itself, me gasping, “Fuck,” and burying my face in his neck, him hissing low and struggling to draw breath.

He pulled my head up, kissing me again, out of control, like he was trying to get everything out of me, like he was trying to steal as much of me as he could, and the fireworks overhead finally registered, it was a new year now, none of the old rules applied, but I still dragged myself away and murmured raggedly, my lips on his throat, “Everybody’s . . . whole fucking team’s just inside,” making sure he would have nothing to use against me later, no way he could say I tricked him, set him up, didn’t remind him of the risks.

He shook his head, biting my ear, making me shiver. “Fuck ‘em. Let them make a fucking video of it, I don’t fucking care.”

Not fucking fair, not in the same hemisphere as fucking fair, him pretending that I’d driven him past his ever-present caution, making me think I was enough for him to give up caring about what people thought, like I could ever have that effect on him, but goddamn it if it didn’t make me shudder, didn’t make me feel like the top of my head was about to come off, everything inside spilling out, glassy and blinding and so fucking far away from fair.

I groaned when his teeth scraped across a pulse point on my neck, and it took just about all the strength I had to push him away, him growling inarticulately and looking to pull me back, but I kept a hand on his chest, kept an arm’s length between us, drawing in great reams of air, saying breathless, “Not that I don’t appreciate the impulse, but let’s maybe think about taking this someplace with a locking door, what do you say?”

He was breathing low and deep and restless, a thousand different things shattering across his face, his eyes swallowing up everything, and then he grinned, Jesus fucking Christ, he grinned like something beautiful and wicked and unholy, he grinned and I was right over the edge, no going back, and I didn’t push him away when he moved against me again, when his hand slid up under my shirt and he whispered in my ear, “I got a room that fits that description.”

I was gonna say something about the house full of people, something about how my place was empty and just over the bridge, something, trying to get hold of some sanity, but then his hand was on my stomach and he flicked open the first button of my jeans, turnabout being fair play, I guess, and I snapped, grabbing him and kissing him hard, rambling out frantically, carelessly, frayed, “Fuck you, fuck you, all right, okay, fuck, okay, let’s go, let’s just go.”

Back in the house, everyone toasting the new year and making hopeful resolutions, we were guilty and trying not to look anyone in the eye, trying to get into his room without anybody seeing us, no way to explain this, not once they saw the wreaking dark looks on our faces, our hand-wrinkled clothes, the way I was following too close behind him, the way our mouths were swollen, the way we surely fooled no one.

Moving quick like phantoms, and then I was in the room, and he was shutting the door, clicking the lock, and turning to face me again, his eyes utterly black with it, and I was falling then, I was falling so fast, so far, and I thought desperately that there was no way I was going to survive this, and then he was kissing me again and I wasn’t thinking about anything anymore.

* * *

 

Look, okay, it wasn’t our fault.

The first time it happened, we were drunk and bored. Understandable, right? You can’t be held accountable for what you do while drunk and bored; that’s how tattoos and military enlistments happen.

And the second time it was New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve definitely doesn’t count. When you’re counting down, watching the clock, taking stock of things, remembering last year, all the stuff that’s happened, when maybe you’re looking at your life and thinking, ‘hey it’s not supposed to be like this,’ or maybe you’re looking at your life and thinking, ‘better than I ever thought I’d be,’ either way, it doesn’t matter, ‘cause there’s your whole life and the seconds are ticking down and they’re lighting the fireworks on boats out in the bay, and you’re a year older and a year closer to wherever it is you’re going to end up.

You can’t blame us for anything that happened on New Year’s Eve.

You know what was the weirdest part of it, the most bizarre of everything that happened that night? It was afterward, when we went back out to the party. ‘Cause, shit, it wasn’t like they were winding down out there, and soon enough our absence would be noted, and folks would set about seeking us out and dragging us back, and that definitely wouldn’t end well.

So afterward, even though I had my doubts that I’d ever be able to move again, Mulder groaned and sat up, saying, “Dude, get dressed.”

I rolled over on my back and blinked at him, feeling woozy and strung-out. “Why? I’m more fun without any clothes on.”

He grinned, looking happy and quietly at peace, his muscles relaxed and working in a smooth rush under his skin, and I was thinking that this is what I had missed three weeks ago, this time after, when we could be friends again, when the full consequences haven’t returned with stunning force to our minds, when Mulder could be easy and kind with me, this is what I had missed when he had left, and I wondered how long this would last, how long before Mulder again realized what he’d done, and Mulder said, “There’s no question about it, but I don’t think those guys out there would quite agree with the assessment.”

I scratched my stomach and asked, “Do we really have to go back out there? I like it in here better.”

Mulder rolled his eyes, bending down to pick my boxers off the floor and toss them to me. “Well, I am hosting this fiasco, probably people would start to talk if we never showed up again.”

“Oh, well, if people are gonna *talk*, heaven forbid,” I said sarcastically, thinking idly that it wouldn’t be so bad if we never showed up again, if we just stayed in here, barricaded the door, stapled the curtains shut, it wouldn’t be so bad if we just stayed here in Mulder’s room forever. I sat up to pull on my shorts, yawning and stretching my arms.

Mulder leaned down again and came up with my T-shirt, the collar ripped jaggedly. “Hmm,” he said, sticking his fingers in the tear. “I think I owe you a shirt.”

I took it from him, holding it out to see how bad the damage was. Shaking my head, I said with a grin, “Nah, it’s cool, it’s totally, like, hardcore punk now. Get me a safety pin and I’ll be all Sex Pistols and stuff.”

Mulder stood up, pulling on his jeans and shrugging into his shirt. I put on the torn shirt and got up to inspect myself in the mirror, my legs shaking a little bit. The rip wasn’t all that big, and anyway, it wasn’t like this was the first time something of mine had gotten destroyed over at Mulder’s house.

We finished getting dressed and then faced each other, Mulder smoothing out the wrinkles in my shirt, me flipping his collar down. Mulder told me, “Your hair’s a mess,” pushing his hand through it.

I shrugged. “My hair’s always a mess. If I went out there with it combed or something, everybody would immediately know something was up.”

“True enough,” he said, leaning in to briefly kiss me, and as he reached for the doorknob, I said, “You know, Mulder, eventually you’re gonna have to buy me dinner or something, you can’t just keep grabbing me and kissing me,” though I think we both knew that was a total lie.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, ducking out into the hall, his eyes flicking, making sure the coast was clear, and I followed him into the living room, realizing as I closed the bedroom door behind me that we hadn’t really talked about anything, nothing had been resolved and I still didn’t know what any of this meant.

But confusion was nothing new to me.

We rejoined the party, skirting the questions easily, Mulder palming my head and saying with a grin to the others, “Seems this young fella can’t drink with the big boys yet. Took me twenty minutes just to get him off the front lawn.”

I wasn’t exactly wild about our cover story being based on me being a lightweight, but whatever, it flew, Chavez laughing and saying, “Great way to ring in the new year, man, you’re off to a good start.”

And it was so strange, sitting there with all of them, feeling like everything was scrawled across my face clear as day, anxiety blazing, waiting for someone to say, “Hey, dude, what happened to your shirt?” or “What are those marks on your neck about?” or “Jesus, Zito, you look like you just got fucked seven ways from Sunday, and did I see you sneaking out of Mulder’s bedroom a second ago?”

I mean, my poker face sucks. Always has. Couldn’t get away with anything in high school, I got into trouble left and right. You’d think that would have taught me something about taking risks, but I’ve never been very good at doing the smart thing.

So we’re sitting there, trying not to show our hand, and I swear, it was the weirdest part of the whole night, trying to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary, trying to pass off the silly grin on my face as a drunk smile that had nothing to do with sex, nothing at all to do with that.

It was like the elephant in the corner of the room that no one was acknowledging. But no one else knew it was there, so it was just me and Mulder’s elephant, the pet that followed us home, nipping at our heels. Our pink elephant, even. Bwahaha.

Kept sneaking looks over at him, him playing it so cool, looking so smooth, and I kept having to swallow hard to get past the thickness in my throat, kept having to lick my lips and pull my eyes away.

By three in the morning, the place was littered with bodies, people passed out on the floor and on the patio furniture, blanketed by coats in the hallway, carpet marks on their faces.

There was a lull (every seven minutes, I’m told, conversation will lag, someone figured that out for some reason), the few stalwarts among us tired and drunk and sitting around in companionable silence, the kind of quiet that sinks down sadly and becomes profound.

Chavez said softly, looking down at his hands, “A new year.”

Hudson, his arm around his wife, who was sleeping sweetly tucked against him, nodded. “A new season, pretty soon.”

I happened to be looking at Mulder at that moment, saw something pull through his eyes, something like panic or resignation, wondered what he was thinking about.

Chavez sighed, looked at us with his gaze hooded, sleepy and affectionate. “Glad I’m here with you guys, though.”

It was simple and it was honest and as such, I expected someone to make a joke, laugh it off, but we all just nodded, whispering, “Yeah,” whispering, “Me too.”

I was looking at Mulder and he was looking at me, and Hatteberg, lying on the floor and drifting in and out of the conversation, lifted his head to say cleanly, “Wish we could stay together forever.”

* * *

And so, you know, we began having our little thing. Or our monumental and life-altering thing, depending on who you were talking to.

All this anger between us, all this stuff that we never said to each other, like half the time Mulder didn’t know whether he wanted to hit me or kiss me, and I knew this was fucking him up, driving him insane, he couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t get his head around it, but that wasn’t really my problem, not yet.

And anyway, we still had a good time. Had a fucking amazing time, actually. I mean, it was the off-season. What else were we gonna do with our days?

Drunk and bored didn’t count. New Year’s Eve didn’t count. And as for the rest of it, well, it just got to be a habit, something we weren’t really thinking about that much. So I guess that’s my excuse, not that I need one.

We just weren’t thinking.

Mulder, he’d had to surrender something on New Year’s, I know that. When he was getting ready for the party, he’d probably taken a long look in the mirror, made some kind of vow to himself, not gonna let that happen again, not gonna talk to Zito, not gonna look at him. And then . . . I don’t know what happened out on the path, I don’t know what happened when we were so close to midnight we could taste it in the air, I don’t know what went through his mind right before he kissed me, but I don’t think it was anything easy, it looked more like being ripped free, viciously tearing away his better judgment.

I don’t think Mulder really wanted to sleep with me again. I mean, obviously he did, but only with one half of his mind, the other half so dead-set against it, and it’s weird to think that I could overcome him like that, that he should lose control like that, and just over me.

Weird.

But, anyway, it happened, and now here we were. In the midst of it. And I forgot to make sure that I had a way out, I forgot to memorize an escape route, because I didn’t know that I’d ever want to escape this.

Spent most of our time over at my apartment. Easier that way, don’t you know. No roommates and all. Mulder, he just made the place his own, started keeping his favorite cereal in my cabinet because no self-respecting person over the age of ten eats Lucky Charms (his words, not mine. Lucky Charms fucking rock.), started stealing the remote control away from me like he lived there, started telling me in the morning, “We’re out of sugar,” started commandeering the sports section, but none of that bothered me too much.

We still never had that big discussion, never laid out the guidelines and figured out where we stood. He’d just show up at my place and we’d hang out, same as always, except, you know, for the making out and stuff.

About once a week or so, he’d get all touchy and short-tempered, and I knew it was getting to him, this very very weird situation that we’d found ourselves in, and I would just hang back, let him work his way through it, always kind of wondering if this was it, if it was gonna be too much for him, but he always came back to me. Like he couldn’t stay away.

I wasn’t really paying attention, so I don’t know exactly when it was that I got in over my head. I was keeping it pretty casual, you know, no big deal and everything, but sometimes it’d strike me, like getting hit by a train, slamming into me, some crystalline moment when I would open my front door and Mulder would be standing there with his pockets full of candy and a grin on his face, when I would wake up in the middle of the night with his head on my stomach, when he’d be pacing around the living room bitching about the bridge toll and winging his hands through the air, when he’d lean over and kiss the side of my neck during a commercial, all these sparkling moments out of time when I’d think suddenly about falling, drowning.

But I could shake that off pretty easy.

It was January, the halfway California cold, our hands bereft, and we were finding baseballs in our sock drawers, in kitchen cabinets, between couch cushions, everywhere, we were holding onto each other because we had nothing else to hold onto, talking all the time about our dead heroes and the sun-drenched near-perfection of our most recent summers, and never about what was going to happen, what was going to become of us, it was January and we were way too far gone, we were becoming permanently carved into each other’s hearts, and we were looking forward to heartbreak, young and stupidly romantic, brashly proud, not believing that there was anything that we wouldn’t be able to handle, it was January and we didn’t know then that we were already lost, and that January was as perfect a thing as I’ve ever known.

* * *

Early in February, Mulder tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.

We were lying around in bed, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock at night yet, because for some reason we’d been unable to keep our hands off each other that day, trying to make dinner but constantly distracted, Mulder eventually pushing me against the refrigerator, kissing me hard, knocking the magnets off, the photos floating dreamily to the ground, and dinner was given up for lost as we stumbled to the bedroom, shedding clothes and half-wrestling, and now we’d gotten that out of the way, but it was too early to go to sleep, so we were just lying around, and Mulder said, “Phoenix in two weeks.”

I brushed my chin across his hair, walked my fingers across his arm onto his chest. “Two and a half,” I told him.

He sighed and rolled away from me, staring up at the ceiling. His voice sounded strange, when he spoke again. “You know, things are gonna have to change, once spring training starts.”

Maybe I knew what he was trying to say. Maybe I always knew he was gonna say it. But I tamped that down, I didn’t let myself think about it. I leaned my head on my hand, looked down at him. “Things change every year. We’ll be all right, we’re game-day players, the whole team.”

Pretending that it was just the team he was worried about, pretending that was the only thing that had any claim on our hearts.

He glanced at me, his eyes flickering, trying to do the right thing. “Spring training . . . once the season starts, we can’t . . . we’re not gonna be able to . . .” He trailed off, his mouth tightening, his eyes working fiercely, and he looked at me briefly, hopelessly, then sighed again, pulling his arm up over his face.

I poked his side, spread out my hand, molding to the warm curve of his ribs, feeling the rise and fall of his breath. “Whatever happens, man, we’ll be okay,” I told him, thinking that that was the truth, as long as I had my hand on him, as long as I could be sure of this, that was the truth.

When he took his arm down, he didn’t look at me, scanning over my bedroom. One wall was all but covered by a huge world map, prickling with green pins for the places I’d been, yellow pins for the places I wanted to go (I stole the box of pushpins from the Coliseum’s press office. They never missed ‘em.).

Mulder said, his voice sounding far away, “Let’s get out of here, Zito. Let’s go someplace.”

I yawned, rubbed my face, nodding. “Okay,” I answered agreeably. “Where’d you have in mind?” thinking that he meant like down to Santa Cruz or something, a day trip.

His eyes traced the map, the places I’d been, the places he’d been, and then smiled, saying like he loved the feel of the word in his mouth, “Wichita.”

I blinked, having not expected that. “Kansas?”

His smile crooked a bit. “You ever been there before?”

“No. You?”

He shook his head, still looking at the map. “It’s a whole new place. No one will know us there.”

I rolled my eyes, joking, “Well, naturally, seeing as how there’s nobody *in* Wichita.”

Mulder slanted me a look. “That west coast arrogance of yours isn’t as charming as you think it is.”

I hiked an eyebrow. Okay, boy, you wanna play? Let’s play. “All right, so what would we do there?”

He shrugged, unconcerned with the question, running his knuckles along the stubble he always let roughen a few days before shaving. “Find a place to live with grass on both sides. Get jobs.”

I laughed. “Jobs? Doing what?”

Flipping his hand through the air, he answered easily, “Whatever regular people do. Something with computers, maybe.”

I slipped my hand back onto his body, keeping my palm perpendicular to his stomach like a shark fin, sleepwalking along. “Well, my job experience consists of the bike shop I worked in when I was sixteen, and then nothing but baseball, so I’m sure I’d have no problem landing a good gig.” I paused, a little taken by the idea despite my sarcasm. Wichita, and we could run away, we could leave all this behind. “And then what?”

Mulder thought about that for a long moment, taking my hand in his and studying it, pulling out my fingers, pressing our palms together to see whose hand is bigger (his was, but only by about a centimeter), and he said, his voice low and calm with possibility, his smile graceful, “We’ll come up with fake names. Nobody’ll know who we are. In the summer, we’ll play for the company softball team, in the city park as the sun’s going down, and we’ll be the best out of everybody, we’ll never have to buy our own drinks. We’ll call in sick to work sometime in June and drive all day and night to Chicago, go out to Comiskey wearing sunglasses and caps so that we won’t get recognized, and then over to Wrigley Field for the Cubs’ night game. Sleep in motels and eat breakfast in gas stations, you’ll read the newspaper out loud while I’m driving and we’re sharing a bottle of orange juice. Swim in Lake Michigan. Come home to Kansas when the sky gets too blue for us to take. We’ll mark off sixty feet and six in the backyard and keep sharp, I’ll show you how to throw the ball faster than you’ve ever dreamed and you’ll teach me your curve, but even once I’ve been sworn to secrecy, I’ll still believe you when you tell me it’s magic. On hundred-degree days in August we’ll sit on the lawn under oak trees and eat Popsicles, talking about California and missing the ocean. No one will know where we are. No one will think to look for us in Wichita. In autumn, before harvest, before the World Series, we’ll drive out of town in the middle of the night and chase each other through the corn fields, our faces and hands sliced all to hell by the edges of the stalks, but it’s okay, it won’t hurt, we’ll heal cleanly out there, no scars. And when the winter comes we’ll quit our jobs and pull down the shades, let the snow pile up outside our door, blocking us in, burying us, and we’ll dream about spring and forget all the stuff we used to know and then we won’t need anything else ever again.”

Mulder’s face settled quietly as he told this story, painted this world for me, his eyes drifting shut, our hands tangled together atop his chest. I pulled mine free and passed my palm over his eyes, watching them come open, and I asked hoarsely, my throat thick, “And we’ll never come back?”

He looked at me, his eyes depthless and sad, then slowly shook his head, whispering, “No, we’ll never come back.”

I leaned forward, pressing a kiss to his mouth, tasting something like tears on my tongue, and he sighed against my mouth, shuddering, like he was holding himself back.

 

Mulder’s eyes were closed, the way you close your eyes against pain, and he said with his voice rough and just this side of scared, “We’re in trouble, Zito, you know that?”

I slid my arm around his back, cupping his shoulder in my palm, placing a kiss on the spot where his jaw met his throat and hiding my eyes in his neck, telling him softly, “Yeah, I know.”

* * *

Didn’t change much. We didn’t buy plane tickets or anything. Didn’t start planning our exodus. We still had time, and we weren’t really going to Wichita, that was just a dream, something to think about while falling asleep, nothing serious, and we still had time.

I thought we did, anyway.

And there was a night when we were watching ESPN Classic, the game where Ripken broke Gehrig’s record, and Mulder fell asleep with his head resting on my back, cradled between my shoulder blades, his hand curled in the valley at the small of my back, me lying on my stomach with a pillow under my chin, and I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, muted the television and just lay there for awhile, not sleeping and never wanting to move again.

And there was a day when the pipes burst in Mulder’s kitchen and I went over to find him and Chavez standing ankle-deep in water, shouting at each other until they saw me laughing at them in the doorway and both started shouting at me, unearthing the phone book and calling a plumber, and while we waited for the guy to show, we folded ships out of the newspaper and set them afloat, sitting at the kitchen table with our shoes and socks off, pants rolled up, kicking water at each other.

And there was an afternoon when we were driving over the bridge with the windows down, the wind howling through, and we had to yell to be heard, Mulder laughing and calling out my name, white ocean birds ducking on knotted flight paths through the cables and struts, the city piled clumsily together and we were high enough that we could see every rooftop for miles.

And there was a morning when I had to get up early for a dentist’s appointment and Mulder rumbled something threatening and possessive as I tried to slip out of bed, tightening his arm around my waist and pulling me back against him, rubbing his face on my shoulder, something like, “mine,” something like, “don’t go,” and I resolved to start flossing on a more regular basis to make up for missing my check-up.

And there was the yellow pin sticking out of Wichita on my world map, and the way I wasn’t sure which one of us had put it there.

And there was the red circle on the calendar in my kitchen, the black circle around the same date on the calendar in Mulder’s bedroom, there was Phoenix getting closer and closer and we couldn’t stop it from happening.

* * *

The night before we were due to report, Mulder showed up with the thirty bucks he owed me and a T-shirt I’d left over at his place a couple of days before.

I was maybe halfway packed, everything strewn around, unfolded jeans on the back of the couch, the coffee table swamped with shirts, a little sock community starting up on the floor by the bookshelf. I kept getting distracted, by something on television, by the squawks of my computer informing me that I had an email or instant message, by my need to go study the contents of the refrigerator, leaving the packing job in the middle, wandering back a while later and saying, “Shit, I still haven’t finished this? I suck.”

And then Mulder was knocking on the door, and as I let him in, I asked, “Hey, are you done packing yet?”

He gave me a disbelieving look, scanning the debris with an exasperated gaze. “I did my packing two days ago. It’s not, like, a vast undertaking, dude.”

I waved my hand around dismissively. “Whatever, whatever. I still got thirteen hours.”

Mulder smiled a little vaguely, and I cleared a space for him to sit on the couch, calling as I went into the kitchen to get some Cokes, “Don’t mess up that pile of shirts, man, they’re in order.”

I came back, handed him a can, Mulder cocking an eyebrow at me. “What possible order could your shirts be in?”

I shoved my duffel bag off the chair, shrugging as I sat down. “Order of coolness. Cleanliness. You know. There is a system here.”

He smirked, then looked down at his hands, rolling the can between his palms. His forehead was lined, and he didn’t look like he’d gotten much sleep the night before.

“Look,” Mulder said, still not looking at me. I didn’t know what he was gonna say.

I swear to God I didn’t.

“When . . . when we get down there, we’re not gonna be able to . . . do this anymore.”

I, of course, didn’t understand. “Not gonna be able to do what anymore?” I asked, unworried, ignorant.

He took a long moment, staring at his hands like the can of Coke was some fascinating artifact, something from long ago. His eyebrows were pulled down, his mouth drawn tight, splatters of off-white on his shirt from when we’d painted the garage door of his house.

“You and me. The . . . the thing where we sleep together. That’s . . . it’s gonna have to stop happening.”

And I . . . I don’t . . . no, that’s not right, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

My eyes maybe got bigger. My heart rate might have picked up, but not by much. My hands got still. But it wasn’t much more than this, slow disbelief and immediate refusal, a blink of motionless panic and then I was gonna fight it, talk him out of it, because I didn’t know what he was saying, I couldn’t fathom it.

My voice was surprisingly easy, which pleased me, in an abstract kind of way, “What do you mean, just while we’re in Phoenix? ‘Cause of the whole living-with-the-team thing? That’s cool. I mean, I was gonna maybe suggest that myself, keep it kinda quiet, no need to take risks or nothing, we’ll just have to be careful.”

And Mulder was shaking his head, his hands clenching, denting the metal. “No, Zito,” he said, cutting me off. “No, man.”

He looked at me then, his face weary, devastated, his eyes dark and certain, like he already knew that there was nothing I could say to change his mind.

“I can’t . . .” he continued, pulling the words out one by one. “I can’t be with you and still . . . still be what I need to be on the field. I need to give everything to the game . . . everything. And once the season starts again . . . we won’t be able to get away with it anymore, they’ll be watching us and we’ll get caught and then . . .”

He trailed off. I was thinking that all that stuff was probably true, he had good reasons, and I must have known that it would have had to end sometime, I must have known that, somewhere, because it was improbable and ill-considered to begin with, so it wasn’t anything so crucial, we were both too temporary to have any real claim on the future, and it’s not the kind of thing that ever works out anyway, not for guys like us.

And I was thinking this and watching him set his Coke down on the coffee table, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

So I wasn’t really expecting the slightly cruel drag in my voice, understanding as I did that this was bound to happen, I wasn’t really expecting to hear myself say, “You’ve never had a problem being with girls during the season. They never take you away from the game.”

He was staring down at the floor, saying tonelessly, “You’re not a girl.”

I scoffed, harsh, biting off the words, “Well, five points, man, are you just getting that now?”

Pulling his hands over his hair, weaving his fingers together at the back of his neck, Mulder said, his eyes still down, “It’s different with you.”

Sure it was, of course. Naturally. Because I wasn’t a girl. Because I was a teammate. Because I was a friend. Because our lives were already too connected, already too much of me in him and vice versa.

I didn’t want to be mad at him. Because, you know, if this was the end, then it should end calm, reasonably, so that we could get back as much of ourselves as possible, if he was walking out I shouldn’t stand in his way, because I knew this had to happen, I always knew.

I didn’t want to be mad at him. I kind of wanted to hit him until he was unrecognizable, but I didn’t want to be mad at him.

Mulder spoke slowly, spelling it out for me. “I can only . . . only do one thing well at a time. When it’s something like this, I can’t do both at once. I can’t do right by you and right by the game at the same time. I’m not set up for that.”

And of course it would be because of the game. Not just because the things he was saying were true, but because that’s always been the ace, the safe word, the only thing that would make me go without much of a fight. Because if baseball was no longer what mattered the most to us, then we wouldn’t be the same guys anymore, probably wouldn’t like each other as much as we did.

Mulder knew this about me, knew what the invocation of baseball would do to me. Of course he did. It’s one of the things we’ve always had in common.

“Okay,” I whispered, not really to him, just to myself, breathe it out, find some solid ground. Trying to work my way through this, trying to figure it out, how am I going to handle this, how am I going to make it through?

What am I gonna do without him?

And panic seized in my throat, dense and choking, pounding through me and I wanted to get out of this, I wanted to run away and not listen to him anymore, I wanted just one more day.

“Well,” I said shakily, holding him still with my eyes, feeling terrified. “Can we at least . . . while we’re in Phoenix? Before Opening Day? We could have another month. We can still . . . we don’t have to stop right this second, we can . . .”

But he was shaking his head, and I was looking at the spots of paint on his shirt, imagining laying him across the couch, knocking the clothes out of the way, and playing connect-the-dots on his chest, drawing one to another, sketching out a net, him smiling with his hands behind his head, stretched out.

Mulder said, “We can’t,” low and resolute and I was wrenched back into anger, my hands tightening on my knees.

“Why not, man?” I said sharply, not holding it together. “Who the fuck would it hurt?”

He lifted his eyes, looking desperate, half-wild, inexplicably beautiful and heartbroken and maybe I never wanted him more than I did at that moment, as he answered, his voice fraying at the edges, “Can’t you . . . can’t you see that I won’t be able to do this in a month?”

I whispered, not begging him but almost, “Then don’t do it at all.”

He shook his head, putting his hands up over his eyes. “That won’t solve anything.”

“And this will?” I cried out, surprised by the vehemence in my voice, the uselessness of it.

Mulder looked at me, looking so tired, and he told me quietly, “Babe, I have to . . . we have to end this now. Before it’s too late.”

I replied almost inaudibly, “Who says it’s not already too late?”

Something snagged across his face, this brief rip of pain, and he looked away, out the window, saying with nothing but sorrow, “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

And I was used up, I was thinking of everything that had happened, my mind slamming past each image, so strange to think that it had only been two and a half months, not even a full summer’s vacation, so strange for Mulder to become such a fixture in me after only two and a half months, and he was leaving, he was making as clean a break as he could, which was the smart thing, the right thing, and all I could think was that fighting Mulder on this wasn’t something I had the strength for, and anyway, Mulder had always been so much stronger than me, there was no way I could win.

I sank back into the chair, feeling slow and stunned, and I breathed out, “ . . . no. You’re right. It’s not true.” Couldn’t be true. Too horrible to think about.

He looked at me for a long time, my friend Mulder, kept staring at me and I got tired of trying to figure out what he was thinking, tired of trying to read his eyes, nothing in there I wanted to know, anyway, and I thought maybe if I stand up right this second, go grab his hand and pull him off the couch, drag him out of here, stuff him in my car and take him to the airport, nothing but the clothes on our backs and paying cash for the first flight to Wichita, not even that, the first flight to Chicago because it’s more convenient, and we’ll rent a car and drive out to Kansas, rolling in before dawn, crazy with exhaustion and missing the freeway exits, if I stand up right now and don’t let him say another word, we could still go, it’s not too late, we could still do it, there’s nothing standing in our way and Wichita like everything I’ve ever wished for, getting smaller as I pulled away, grew up, moved on, until what was left wasn’t big enough to believe in, and then Mulder stood up.

Stood up and came over to me, reached down, his fingers on my face, the heel of his hand against my jaw, and I was staring up at him as he pulled his thumb slowly over my mouth, all the things he knew that I didn’t, all the ways in which this was the right thing to do, and Mulder whispered, “We did the best we could,” and I closed my eyes, thinking that if I cried right now, the tear would run down and touch his hand, but I wasn’t crying, and Mulder’s fingertips touched my eyelids and then he was gone, and I didn’t open my eyes until I heard my front door close, and I was surrounded, I was alone and this was not the way it was supposed to be.

* * *

(this is where the wheels come off)

It’s been a couple of years since the last big fire in the hills. The burning off. With the dusty heat, it’s tinderbox dry out in the corn-colored grass that snaps between your fingers like a matchstick. Just lying in wait for the first of the summer lightning, for the sun to spear off a broken glass bottle lying on the side of the path, for the unthinking cartwheel of a cigarette flicked out an open car window. And then the hills will burn and you’ll be able to see the smoke for miles, be able to smell it in your hair, on your skin, leaving handprints of ash on everything you touch.

Been even longer since the last big earthquake, and this is what we are waiting for the most. I wasn’t there, I only kind of remember. I was twelve years old and sitting on the carpet of the living room, at the foot of my dad’s chair, and he was using the top of my head as a table for his beer, balancing, telling me seriously, “Hold still now, my son, we’ve almost got it,” and I was giggling, squirming, trying to be motionless. We were waiting for the World Series to start, and my mother was in the kitchen with one of my sisters, drinking tea and talking about graduation, college, the future, all these irrelevant topics that I couldn’t find any footholds in, because my father’s hand was on my head and the World Series was going to be on soon.

And it was exciting, because this was a California World Series, the Bay Bridge Series, taking place four hundred miles north, which is a long way for the American West, a long way for anyplace, but it was better than the three thousand miles we were used to, the echo of the Yankees and Red Sox and Mets that came to us second-hand, all the east coast asleep as our cowboy teams took the field.

A California World Series, and I swear, I was rooting for the A’s that day, I was, enough Dodger-inspired Giant antipathy in me even though we didn’t live in Los Angeles, the Padres were my team but they’d been out of the race since August, so what else was I supposed to do? I was rooting for the A’s, who were favored to win, anyway, a safe bet.

The low-slung suburban home of my childhood, the ravine down at the dead-end of the street, where we used to build forts and fight afternoon wars, overgrown with vines and roots and the weirdly clear creeks, cut like tear tracks through the wilderness, here where I played in the street at sunset with my friends who lived nearby, running around with our dirty sneakers slapping the asphalt, chasing down bright orange rubber balls with hockey sticks, scratching out tuck-and-hook plays in the dirt, the football under my knee, learning how to field ground balls off the curbs and sewer grates the way Boston outfielders learn how to field off the Monster, dive-bombing off the roofs of our houses when our parents weren’t home, dropping like silver coins into the bushes, an explosion of leaves and dust, our noses pinched shut.

San Diego and my life there, and the first spanning views of the Bay Area on the television as game time neared, islands and bridges and hills, so different from this victorious desert, and just as the color men began to introduce their perfect autumn day, the camera shuddered, the whole screen fuzzed, there was a burst of chaotic noise, panic, people crying out, my dad’s hand going still on my head, and I looked up to find him staring at the screen, something like shock or fear, foreign expressions on my father’s face, the kind of look that you get when you realize, with complete and utter certainty, that people will die before this day is out, die bloody, die trapped, that moment when you know this and know simultaneously that there is nothing you can do about it.

The screen had gone blank, and my father was rising, calling my mom, saying, “I think something happened up north,” and then they were trying to call my Uncle David in Marin County but the phone lines were down, and then the special bulletin had come on TV, the earliest reports, before even the aftershocks had hit, before the earthquake was even finished with its destruction, and no one knew the extent of anything, but I was twelve and all I knew was that the World Series was supposed to be on and it wasn’t, and this was unthinkable, the World Series occupying at the time in my mind the same general and unquestioned authority as the sun rising in the morning, something beyond the base laws and tragedies of the rest of the world, this idea that whatever happened was bad enough to stop the World Series, even just delay it, I might as well have been told that the warm ocean where I had learned to swim was nothing more than a practical joke, an illusion, this kind of absurd.

And by the time the television was showing us pictures of the collapsed Bay Bridge, the pile-ups on the freeway, a woman sitting on the curb weeping, her clothes smeared black and still smoldering, the grasping panic of downtown San Francisco once the power went out, people walking through the toppled shelves of grocery stores in a stupor, staring at the wreckage, feet crunching on bags of chips, sticking to the pools of soda on the tile floor, by the time they started talking about the fault line and showing us geological survey maps, marking out the epicenter, the bulls-eye rings to show where was most affected, where was least, by the time someone brought up 1906 as buildings were burning in the background, by the time we fully understood what had happened, and had gotten through to Uncle David, assured the continuance of his blessed life (“How’re you doing, little man?” he asked me when my dad put me on the phone. “When’s the game gonna be back on?” I replied, one-track mind, and he laughed.), by the time everything had begun to settle down a bit, my parents and sisters were able to joke nervously about close calls and dancing on the edge, my mom taking the opportunity to refresh my earthquake-preparedness training, which had been a part of my life since my second day of public school, and that was the first time that I really comprehended what an earthquake was, after all the warning they’d given me, for the first time I figured out the power of it, the cruelness and beauty, because an earthquake had stopped the World Series, and for me, that made it the most fearful thing I could imagine.

That was the first time I understood that my home was not a safe place, that my careful life was not beyond this kind of catastrophe, that was when I lost my sense of security and gained a sense of utter recklessness, because we live moment to moment and when the fault line shifts again, no one will be surprised to find themselves dying young.

 

And so here we are now, out here in California where nothing lasts forever and nothing is ever yours to keep, here we are well-stocked with canned goods and bottled water, here we are in San Francisco, San Francisco like something we were promised when we were kids, here where everything is more precarious, built on uncertain and fantastic foundations, built as a dare by men who came looking for gold, and here, take this city, it’s no good to me now, take these hills and this ocean, take the wildness of the land that can never be quite beat back, take this place that is already marked as gone, take this place and write nothing down about what will become of us, because here we are already planning for the next disaster, when last earthquake finally tears us free and we can go floating off, sinking down, the new Atlantis, we are here, where if we don’t drown we’ll burn like the hills, and it is a natural thing, brushfires, heartfires, it is the way the soil is replenished, the way you have to die to rise from the ashes, and so fitting that it should all happen here, in this place of loss and renewal, where we talk about rebirth and escape and whether or not we could swim to Alcatraz, this is San Francisco on the very edge of the world, as far west as you can get, and here in San Francisco we are waiting for the earth to break under our feet, waiting for all the dire and magnificent promise of this place to be revealed, all the pure immolation to come home to us, and we’ll be martyrs then, we’ll be forgiven all our sins and our hands will be clean.

* * *

Now this happens, okay. I get poetic, romantic, rhapsodic, at the oddest moments. Being abruptly destroyed will do that to a person. Young enough so that everything that happens has a veil of the epic about it, a sense of the lyrical. Some stuff, the only way you can really talk about it is to have it fall into stanza, start seeing metaphors and imagery, there’s some stuff that you can’t help getting philosophical and profound about. Baseball. California. The ocean. The potential for violence and boundless love drifting heavily down on these quiet streets. You can’t help it.

And I don’t sleep too much these days. And I’m tired of staring at the desert and I know we didn’t mean anything by it, I know, and I don’t want to think about it anymore, and I don’t like the way the future looks, I don’t like the way everything is happening faster than I expected, and I swear to God, I didn’t think it’d hurt this bad.

And I still see Kansas in your eyes sometimes, man, do you know that? I still see that life we weren’t brave enough to live, I see two young men under a blue sky, out where we won’t have to worry about falling into the ocean, out where things won’t be so complicated, the Midwestern sun and the strength in your arms, chaff in my hair, I see a mess of blankets on the bed, the light so fresh and clean, sprawling over us, I see us swimming in a river somewhere, swinging out on a rope tied to a tree branch, leaves sticking to our wet arms and legs as we lie on the bank and wait to dry, I see us running so fast, right out of our shoes, sprinting barefoot and whirling, spinning, until between laughing and racing each other we’ve run out of breath and collapse panting onto the warm ground, I see you repaired, fused back together, and all the things that have hurt you are far away and forgotten, and we’re keeping each other safe, out there in Wichita, rescuing each other, and I cannot escape your vision of the life we gave up, I can’t get it out of my head, because it’s in your eyes and sometimes your eyes are the only thing I can see.

All my protests about blame, about liability and guilt, all the times I’ve tried to talk my way out of this, claiming blindly that it’s not my fault, can’t hold it against me, it doesn’t count, all that stuff, it’s bullshit. You should know this, I should know this.

This, it’s my fault, everything.

My fault for wanting him for so long, my fault for loving the way he looked, my fault, I started it, I wasn’t playing fair, it was me, all me, and now I’ll never be able to get away from him, I’ll never be shook free, and neither will he, and I’m sorry, Mulder, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done this to you, I didn’t mean it, I’m so fucking sorry, please, man, forgive me, please, because I have to go out there alone now and I’m not sure I can, because none of this was supposed to happen and there’s nothing inside me now and I don’t think I can do this, man, I don’t think I’ll be okay.

But, no. He doesn’t listen. He won’t hear. It’s nothing I’d ever say out loud, anyway, not until my knees hit the concrete and I can’t take it anymore.

And what good would it do? Who would that save?

We had our chance. Wichita, and the one thing missing from Mulder’s dream of Kansas was baseball, the one thing he didn’t mention, the fact that neither of us have ever been able to live without the game, and we’d be without it there, with our regular jobs, our grass-lined house, even with the poor substitutes of sixty feet and six marked out in the backyard, the softball games under the darkening sky, those won’t count, and it was perfect, wasn’t it, because if we were running away we should run away from everything, we should let nothing hold us back, not even the game. Especially not the game.

If this is true, if there is a life somewhere for me and him, then yes, I would sacrifice baseball, I would, I swear to God, if that meant we could be free, I would give it up, never stand on the mound again, feeling the crush of fifty thousand voices screaming, all alone out there, never again work my fingers over the stitches, lean in to squint at the signs, never again hike my knee up and whip my arm around, so much power, so much joy, never again, I would let it go, all of it, if that’s the price I have to pay, then it’s worth it, it is.

But the game’s not the only thing that’s holding us back.

Sometimes I think Mulder was right, ending it like he did, when he did, for those reasons. Surely we would never be able to deal with both the game and each other at the same time, surely we would have destroyed each other before the All-Star break, torn apart because there’s only so much room inside one heart. I would have gotten tired of him, he would have gotten tired of me, because we are neither of us the kind who see stuff through, we give up too easily, we kill things before their time because they’re going to die anyway, and better that it happens now, by our hand, so that the end will be ours, like the creation and the life of it. So that this will still be ours.

And most of the time I recognize Wichita for the fantasy that it was, when Mulder’s done something unbelievably dense and thoughtless (I don’t have to be sleeping with him for him to annoy the living shit out of me), when I don’t want to crawl back into his arms so much as haul off and put his teeth down his throat, times like these I know that we could never have made it out in Kansas, so far away from our ocean and our game, there’s no way we would have lasted.

But every now and then, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I’ll see it, in his eyes, in my own, in the width of my hand, in the sleekness of his back, in the wreck of his grin, in these scars that won’t heal, in our friendship and all the things that we’ve left behind, in my demand that our existence be implicitly gorgeous, every now and then I’ll see it, laid out for me clear and unmistakable, I’ll see me and Mulder, together somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I’ll see that life not lived like a sucker punch stealing my wind away, and I’ll know how close we came, how we were inches away from being perfect, being happy, being at peace.

* * *

All right, you want this to end? Yeah, me too.

Don’t worry about it. We’ll be okay. The season’s started again, we don’t have to think about anything but baseball anymore. The way he wanted it. The way I wanted it too, okay, fine.

It’s just one of those things, you know? And you try to find your way through it, but you only ever remember to try in the middle of the night, and then it’s too dark to see anything, you just get more mixed up, turned around. But it doesn’t need all this analysis. I mean, it was only two and a half months. What kind of damage could we really do to each other in just two and a half months? Nothing so bad.

But yeah, okay. And something true, I guess. To finish it up. Because everything is all shadowed with memory and it’s hard to tell what really happened, where my hand was, what he said, how his voice sounded, what was going on in my head, how honest we were being with each other. You can never quite figure out the reality of something if all you’ve got is the recollection of it.

And anyway, I’m tired now, I’m ready to be over this.

But one last thing, one last, and this I am certain of, this is the only thing I believe anymore.

What I said earlier, about me not being stupid enough to fall in love with Mark Mulder?

Yeah, that was a lie.

THE END


End file.
